(1) Field of the Invention
The invention relates to platform security. More specifically, the invention relates to handling asynchronous events in a secure manner.
(2) Background
Data security is an ongoing concern in our increasingly data-driven society. To that end, multimode platforms have been developed to support both normal execution and isolated execution. A section of memory is allocated for use only in the isolated execution mode. Encryption and authentication are used any time isolated data is moved into a non-isolated section of memory. In this manner, data used and maintained in isolated execution mode is not security compromised. However, during isolated execution that data may reside, for example, in the processor cache in an unencrypted form. Certain asynchronous events may cause that data to be accessible in a normal execution mode thereby compromising the data security.